Personalized image collages, clothing, albums and other image enhanced items are becoming increasingly more accessible at the retail level as printing and digital technologies improve and drop in cost. However, as the ability to deliver a personalized image bearing product has become more accessible, the novelty and perceived value of such gifts has diminished. Accordingly consumers have become more discriminating and seek items that bear customized images in a more seamless and integrated manner. However, few consumers are equipped with the combination of artistic, aesthetic, and technical gifts necessary to successfully master such items. Those that do often lack the time necessary to do this task effectively.
Of particular interest to many consumers are the difficulties that are associated with arranging images within a plurality of window openings in a framing and masking system combination. Typically, this process involves arranging individual images such as conventional 41″×6″ photographs behind the windows in the masking system, such as a matte, and then securing each individual image to the masking system in the arranged fashion. It will be appreciated that this is a difficult and time-consuming task. Further, it will be appreciated that this conventional approach is difficult to use with certain artistic styles wherein certain windows of a matte are used to present different portions of the same image or other artistic styles wherein it is desired to provide images in a plurality of the window areas of the mattes that have consistent image characteristics such as of image scale, image tone, image color characteristics and/or other characteristics. The conventional approach further creates difficulties in providing uniform alignment of images from window to window such as where, for example, it is desired to provide images that are arranged in a nonlinear or curvilinear or other patterned arrangements. Further it will be appreciated that not all masks provide windows that are sized and/or shaped in a manner that is consistent with the size and shape of a portion of a printed image that the consumer wishes to place in the window.
In yet another related art, it is known to provide consumers with tools to enable creation of electronic scrapbooking or album pages. Where this is done, consumers are provided with the ability to generate a digital canvas upon which the consumers can impose background imagery, colors, or other visual effects, and upon which they can place individual images in any of a wide variety of forms. However, such digital systems are not typically adapted for use with actual masking or matting systems. In particular, such digital systems operate from a presumption that a generated album page can be recorded using a single receiver medium. Thus the diversity of framing systems that are available to a user are inherently limited by the receiver mediums on which the album pages can be recorded. Such receiver mediums typically dictate a limit on the size, shape, and/or aspect ratio arrangement for all of the digital canvases that can be used by the electronic scrapbooking or album mastering software. Where such electronic scrapbooking or album mastering software is used to generate receiver mediums for use in a framing and masking system that has a size and/or aspect ratio that does not correspond to the size, shape, and/or aspect ratio of the available receiver mediums, a user is left with the challenges of manually attaching the printed receiver mediums to the masking system as discussed above.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a system that creates arrangements of images that can be printed on available receiver mediums so that the printed receiver mediums can easily be positioned in registration with arrangements of window areas of a masking system that is held within a known framing system.